Our issue opens with a reflection on racist motifs at festivals and parades throughout Colombia. Melissa Valle ties the presence of characters that mirror “Mammy” and “Jezebel” archetypes and evoke the primitive African to the globally circulating racial imagination. As local narratives meet global representations, these subservient, sexualized, and animalistic representations make race legible. Resisting what many US scholars of Latin America are accused of — “mistranslating critique into travesty, difference into error, signifyin(g) into noise” (Chude-Sokei 2006: 90) — Valle is nonetheless unflinching in examining how processes of racialization and racial representation degrade, particularly in terms of the way the imagination of race reflects not just local histories but international representations and expectations of how race is done.

Dave Tell continues on our theme of global transmission but shifts our attention to the 1940s, when the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier,...